Some bottled-up truths about purified water

from an article at philSTAR.com

Some bottled-up truths about purified water CONSUMERLINE By Ching M. Alano (The Philippine Star) Updated May 17, 2011 12:00 AM

Computer graphics by REY RIVERA
| Zoom

The long hot summer is here! And suddenly, all I can think of is a most refreshing drink of water to quench my thirst, wash away the day’s blahs, and soothe my weary spirit.
So, I grab a bottle of water (never cold, just room temperature water  and not because of the mistaken notion that drinking cold water makes you fat, but that’s another story), open my e-mail and read this riveting item from Yahoo Green: “The Environmental Working Group (EWG is an American environmental organization) analyzed the company websites and product labels of over 170 varieties of bottled water in the US to see if the companies disclosed information on where their water came from, how the water was treated, and whether the results of tests to ensure purity were revealed.”
Thirsty for more information, the researchers also called the bottled water companies to ask if they would be willing to share information with consumers.
And the findings are: “More than half of the bottled water products failed the transparency test. Almost 20 percent didn’t say where their water comes from, and an additional 32 percent did not disclose any information on treatment or purity of water.”
Yahoo Green pours out more absorbing facts: Only three brands earned the highest possible marks  Gerber Pure Purified Water, Nestle Pure Life Purified Water, and Penta Ultra-Purified Water.
A great majority of the bottled water companies refuse to divulge what’s really in their bottles. There are just a lot of bottled-up truths that consumers ought to know.
Taking consumers’ best interests to heart, EWG went out to seek answers to these questions: Where does the water come from? Is it purified; if so, how? Is the water tested, and what, if any, contaminants have been found?
Sadly, according to the EWG, of the top 10 best-selling brands, nine failed to answer all three foregoing questions. Of the 173 bottled water products included in the survey, only Nestlé Pure Life Purified Water discloses the needed information squarely on its label, and gives information for requesting a water quality test report.
All told, the EWG gave only three bottled water products a good rating for transparency: Nestlé Pure Life Purified Water, Gerber Pure Purified Water, Penta Ultra-Purified Water.
Probably most Pinoy households today don’t drink water from the tap and opt instead for bottled water. Indeed, bottled water is a thriving industry and there are just too many brands on the market today. Bottled water is peddled everywhere  in bus and train stations; in the streets, vendors shove it in your face while you’re caught in traffic. Of course, you wonder where on earth did they get their bottled water?
But in the US, it was found that about “40 percent of bottled water is regular tap water, which may or may not have received any additional treatment.” And the truth is, “most municipal tap water must adhere to stricter purity standards than the bottled water industry. The EPA requires large public water suppliers to test for contaminants as often as several times a day, but the FDA requires private bottlers to test for contaminants only once a week, once a year, or once every four years, depending on the contaminant.”

Aside from the all-important question of purity or water quality, plastic bottles are one of the most environmentally-unfriendly industries. They pollute the environment and contain a cocktail of harmful chemicals like phthalates which have been linked to reproductive problems and BPA which disrupts the endocrine system (the glands that produce and store hormones).


So, think before you drink!

Another test done by EWG in 2009 found 38 low-level contaminants in bottled water.

What is the Life Cycle of a Plastic Bottle?

From an article at WiseGeek

Plastic bottles are used to package a wide variety of things, from juice to soft drinks, and they play a ubiquitous role in the lives of many consumers, along with other plastic products. With a growing awareness of the environmental issues which surround plastics, many people have become interested in the life cycles of plastic products, from manufacturing to eventual disposition in a landfill or recycling facility. Being aware of the process behind the production of plastics can encourage consumers to think more carefully about how they use and dispose of such plastics. Because plastic bottles are a very visible form of plastic use, plastic bottles make an easy target for activism and education.

The life cycle of a plastic bottle starts, obviously, with the creation of the plastic used to make it. The vast majority of plastic bottles are manufactured from petroleum, some of which comes from deposits as much as three billion years old. Some manufacturers use bioplastics made from plant materials to create their plastic bottles, out of concern for the environment.

In the case of a plastic bottle made from petroleum, the oil must be extracted before being shipped to a processing facility and then distilled to separate out the various hydrocarbons it contains. Oil extraction is performed all over the world in a variety of locations, and it has a number of environmental impacts. In areas where oil is drilled from the seafloor, for example, oil spills are common, and regions like the Middle East are famous for their heavily polluting oil fires, caused by intentional or accidental combustion of oil fields. In some nations, oil extraction is also bound up with a number of social issues. Nigeria, for instance, has an oil industry notoriously plagued with problems; oil workers are often poorly paid and exposed to very hazardous conditions, and periodic devastating fires along oil pipelines are not uncommon.

Once oil has been extracted, it is typically moved into container tankers for shipping to refinery facilities. At a refinery, the oil can be submitted to a variety of distillation processes, such as fractional distillation, where the crude oil is heated, causing its various components to separate so that the refinery can make gas, fuel oil, plastics, and a variety of other products. Crude oil can also be “cracked” with chemical catalysts to generate hydrocarbon chains of a desired length; this practice is common, because demand for various petroleum products constantly fluctuates, and cracking ensures that oil is used extremely efficiently and generates the maximum possible profit.

Calculate how much your water habit costs~

The real cost of bottled water

from an article in 'The Age' 2007

AUSTRALIA'S love affair with bottled water is costing the planet 314,000 barrels of oil a year.

That's how much of one of the world's most precious resources it takes to package, ship and refrigerate a product that is already piped to every single suburban premises for next to nothing, according toSunday Age calculations.

"It's one of the greatest cons ever pulled," says Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan. "It's just lunacy, there is no other word for it. We are squandering our oil resources."

Oil is not the only precious resource being squandered by consumers, with bottled water 2500 times more expensive than the tap variety.

"Drinking water in Melbourne or Sydney costs around $1.20 a tonne," says Mr Kiernan. "Australian bottled water costs around $3000 a tonne. And Italian bottled water? About $9000 a tonne.

"It's more expensive than petrol — if you could turn petrol into water you could make money."

According to the Australasian Bottled Water Institute, we spend about $385 million a year on bottled water.

Peter Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute, which provides independent research and policy analysis on issues of development and the environment, recently calculated that demand for bottled water in the United States was burning up at least 17 million barrels of oil a year.

"And that's just the energy required to make the plastic resin and make it into bottles. It doesn't include the energy needed to get the bottled water to your local store," Dr Gleick says.

He estimates that the total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a quarter of a plastic bottle with crude oil.

"There are some situations where it might be OK to buy a bottle of water, but I don't think consumers are fully aware of the economic and environmental impact of what it takes to produce a bottle of water," he says.

"Especially when pure, clean drinking water is available, literally, on tap."

With no chlorine added to kill bacteria and no fluoride to strengthen teeth, bottled water can't even be considered better for you.

Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is urging consumers to think more carefully about their purchases.

"We must be thoughtful all of the time," Mr Turnbull says. "And we must encourage people to think about the way they use all our resources."

Mr Turnbull says the waste of resources used to get bottled water to the shop also highlights the need for a carbon price.

why water and plastic bottles just don't go together

 Why Grey whales need protection

from a blog Neptune 911!

November 16, 2010 by Charmaine Coimbra

Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of an editorial published 11/13/10 in The Santa Cruz Sentinel

By

Sue Arnold

Three years ago, the California Gray Whale Coalition was created with one specific goal: to relist gray whales under the Endangered Species Act.

In 1994, gray whales were delisted. Although the population at that time appeared healthy and was increasing, five years later a major crash saw over a third of the whales die of starvation. The reasons for the huge collapse were widely debated but a research report co-authored by Burney Le Boeuf, then-interim vice chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, supported the contention that lack of adequate prey caused by a regime shift was the most likely cause.

As specialist feeders, the whales are dependent primarily on benthic amphipods in the Bering and Chukchi seas. These tiny crustacea provide sufficient energy for reproduction and one of the longest migrations by any baleen whale — from the sub-Arctic to the Baja lagoons.

More recently, climate change has had a major impact on the primary feeding grounds. Warming seawater temperatures create conditions that do not favor amphipod reproduction, causing grief to the whales. This season, whale watching organizations and the National Marine Fisheries Service NMFS reported the fourth consecutive year of very low cow/calf counts, many emaciated whales and a large number of whales dying of starvation, their pitifully thin bodies washing ashore along the West Coast.

As a result of lobbying efforts by the coalition, members of the California Assembly and Senate passed a joint resolution that called on Congress to ensure funding for NMFS to undertake badly needed research on gray whales, and, if warranted, to relist the species under the Endangered Species Act. Many West Coast city councils passed similar resolutions.

 Representatives of the coalition have lobbied in Washington, D.C., and recently submitted a comprehensive scientific petition to NMFS requesting the whales be upgraded to depleted status under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. NMFS has 60 days to respond to this petition.

The agency can either agree to conduct a status review or upgrade the whales, currently listed as a stock of least concern, to depleted status, ensuring greater attention to the species — including habitat protection. If NMFS denies the petition, the coalition can legally challenge the decision and will certainly take that action if necessary.
In the early 2000s, the founding group of the coalition organized a scientific workshop using the gray whale as an indicator species of the Bering Sea. The workshop brought together specialist scientists from Mexico, Canada, Australia and the US. Professor Le Boeuf was instrumental in pulling together many of the experts. After two days of discussion, it was clear gray whales were facing major threats from many sources.
Another scientific workshop is urgently needed as the threat of ocean acidification, warming seawater temperatures and melting sea ice impact their feeding grounds. Oil and gas leases also cover these primary habitats, and transient orcas are taking large numbers of calves and juveniles as they migrate back to the sub-Arctic waters.
These whales are our ocean neighbors. The loss of gray whale tourism would have a major impact on many coastal communities that rely on the millions of dollars generated by whale watching and the flow-on effect.
The California Gray Whale Coalition believes raising awareness and public concern over the plight of the whales is an essential step in their protection.
Sue Arnold is CEO of the California Gray Whale Coalition.

• Share this:
• Email
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Print
• StumbleUpon

The Most Expensive Tap Water on Earth?

 Bottled water comes only from pristine streams, right? Not necessarily.

In fact, nearly half of all bottled water is reprocessed tap water, sold at prices up to 3,000 times higher than consumers pay for tap water. And even before the additional processing, the water meets federal water-quality standards.

From CBS news

Bottled water – is it the new eco-disaster?

 Victorians are fortunate to have access to high quality tap water. However, many people in Victoria still consume bottled water in preference to tap water believing that it tastes better and has health benefits. Read the following newspaper article to get the low down on how the consumption of bottled water in Australia, and the World, is fast becoming a costly habit on our wallets and on our environment.

Bottled water the 'new eco-disaster'

By Catharine Munro, The Age, February 26, 2006

Australians' love affair with bottled water has left environmentalists worried about the toll on the planet.

With 65 per cent of plastic drink bottles ending up in landfill, they are calling for better recycling services.

The popularity of bottled water is rising at a rate of 10 per cent a year in Australia.

About 550 million litres were consumed in 2004-05, according to the Australian Beverage Council, with most purchases being made in addition to soft drinks, rather than replacing them.

The plastic water bottles are becoming a major environmental hazard. They suck up valuable fuels to make.

They also create mountains of rubbish when they are thrown away.

Environmental scientist Tim Grant said it was "counter-intuitive" that bottled water was such a successful product. "People pay $2.50 for something that's free," he said.

A recent report by the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute said global consumption of bottled water rose 57 per cent from 1999 to 2004 to 154 billion litres. Much of the growth came from countries such as Australia, where most tap water is just as high a quality as anything that can be bought.

Packaging worldwide required 2.7 million tonnes of plastic each year, the report's author, Emily Arnold, said.

The manufacture of bottles used up 1.5 million barrels of crude oil in the US because the plastic is made from the fossil fuel, Ms Arnold said.

"In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels," she said.

In Australia, the energy cost of buying water instead of drawing it from a tap was comparable to driving a car, said Mr Grant, who is the assistant director of design at RMIT University.

While driving a car for one kilometre used four megajoules of energy, drinking a 600-millilitre bottle of water used 1.5 megajoules, when the transport costs were included.

By contrast, drinking water out of a tap used only 0.2 megajoules, Mr Grant said. And when they are no longer wanted, water bottles were taking up space in landfill sites.

While Australians are enthusiastic recyclers at home, they don't get the opportunity with bottled water because it's usually bought when people are out at the movies, at the beach or shopping.

"Australia's recycling system does not collect away-from-home waste," Total Environment Centre director Jeff Angel said.

Of the 118,000 tonnes of drink bottle plastic consumed every year, only 35 per cent of it was recycled, he said.

People should bring their own water containers.

"It's like shopping bags, it's the same problem," Mr Angel said.

"There's an argument for people putting their own tap water into containers."

In South Australia, where consumers can redeem a deposit for drink containers, the bottles made up less than 10 per cent of the state's rubbish, compared with 13.4 per cent nationally.

Drink bottles also take up more space than other waste, comprising 38 per cent of total volume of litter. They appear mostly in parks and floating on the waterfront, according to statistics from Clean Up Australia. They are deadly for thirsty wildlife, which get trapped inside containers.

"They are attractive, they catch the light and they are shiny, so little animals see them and get in," Clean Up Australia spokeswoman Therrie-Ann Johnson said.

Consumers needed deposit schemes to encourage them not to throw away their bottles, Ms Johnson said. The not-for-profit organisation was in talks with private companies to establish public recycling at shopping centres.

However, ensuring a recycling bin at public locations was difficult because beaches, parks and shopping centres were run by a wide range of groups, from listed companies to municipal councils.

Information sourced from BOTTLED WATER: Pouring resources down the drain by Emily Arnold Feb 2006. Earth Policy Institute -www.earthpolicy.org.

Top

Questions

1. How much bottled water was consumed by Australians in 2004-05?
2. What percentage of all plastic drink bottles end up in landfill in Australia?
3. If 118,000 tonnes of plastic bottles are consumed every year what weight of plastic bottles end up in landfill?
4. Assume that most bottled water (550million litres) consumed in Australia is sold in 600ml plastic bottles. Based on this assumption approximately 916 million plastic bottles potentially could be recycled in Australia each year. On current figures 65 per cent of all plastic drink bottles end up in landfill. Based on these figures how many bottled water bottles are likely to go to landfill each year?
5. Consumption of bottled water is rising by 10 per cent each year in Australia. On these predictions how much bottled water is likely to be consumed in Australia by 2010? How many bottles to landfill will that mean?
6. What are plastic drink bottles made out of?
7. According to this article why are bottled water bottles recycled less than other recyclable items?
8. How could Australia reduce the number of plastic bottles that go to landfill each year?
9. Why is bottled water an environmental hazard compared to water obtained from the tap? Think of energy use, resource use and waste disposal.
10. Draw a life cycle diagram for bottled water.
11. Apart from the environmental problems that bottled water causes it is also very expensive. Tap water costs 75 cents for 1000 litres while bottled water is sold at $2,400 per 1000 litres! (assuming $1.50 for a 600 mlbottle).
    • Calculate how much a litre of tap water costs.
    • Calculate how much a litre of bottled water costs.
    • If you drank 2 litres of tap water instead of 2 litres of bottled water how much money would you save?
    • Calculate the dollar ($) saving for your class, then your school population, if everyone brought tap water from home in their own reuseable water bottle instead of buying bottled water at the next sporting event.
    • How many plastic water bottles would be saved?
12. After reading the article and answering the questions what do you think about bottled water?
13. Design a poster to promote drinking tap water from a reusable container.

Message in a Bottle ~ 5th installment

 Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles' journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

The bubbles in San Pellegrino are extracted from volcanic springs in Tuscany, then trucked north and injected into the water from the source.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail.

San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles--so much a part of the mystique of the water itself--weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino--it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter we buy. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO₂ carefully--it is extracted from supercarbonated volcanic springwaters in Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.

Poland Spring may not have any oceans to traverse, but it still must be trucked hundreds of miles from Maine to markets and convenience stores across its territory in the northeast--it is 312 miles from the Hollis plant to midtown Manhattan. Our desire for Poland Spring has outgrown the springs at Poland Spring's two Maine plants; the company runs a fleet of 80 silver tanker trucks that continuously crisscross the state of Maine, delivering water from other springs to keep its bottling plants humming.

We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.

In transportation terms, perhaps the waters with the least environmental impact are Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani. Both start with municipal water. That allows the companies to use dozens of bottling plants across the nation, reducing how far bottles must be shipped.

Yet Coke and Pepsi add in a new step. They put the local water through an energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process more potent than that used to turn seawater into drinking water. The water they are purifying is ready to drink--they are recleaning perfectly clean tap water. They do it so marketing can brag about the purity, and to provide consistency: So a bottle of Aquafina in Austin and a bottle in Seattle taste the same, regardless of the municipal source.

There is one more item in bottled water's environmental ledger: the bottles themselves. The big springwater companies tend to make their own bottles in their plants, just moments before they are filled with water--12, 19, 30 grams of molded plastic each. Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person. Durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact: Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

Some of the water companies are acutely aware that every business, every product, every activity is under environmental scrutiny like never before. Nestlé Waters has just redesigned its half-liter bottle, the most popular size among the 18 billion bottles the company will mold this year, to use less plastic. The lighter bottle and cap require 15 grams of plastic instead of 19 grams, a reduction of 20%. The bottle feels flimsy--it uses half the plastic of Fiji Water's half-liter bottle--and CEO Jeffery says that crushable feeling should be the new standard for bottled-water cachet.

"As we've rolled out the lightweight bottle, people have said, 'Well, that feels cheap,'" says Jeffery. "And that's good. If it feels solid like a Gatorade bottle or a Fiji bottle, that's not so good." Of course, lighter bottles are also cheaper for Nestlé to produce and ship. Good environmentalism equals good business.

Message in a Bottle ~ 3rd installment

 From the start, Nevins pioneered a three-part strategy. First, he connected bottled water to exclusivity: In 1977, just before Perrier's U.S. launch, he flew 60 journalists to France to visit "the source" where Perrier bubbled out of the ground. He connected Perrier to health, sponsoring the New York City Marathon, just as long-distance running was exploding as a fad across America. And he associated Perrier with celebrity, launching with $4 million in TV commercials featuring Orson Welles. It worked. In 1978, its first full year in the United States, Perrier sold $20 million of water. The next year, sales tripled to $60 million.

What made Perrier distinctive was that it was a sparkling water, served in a signature glass bottle. But that's also what left the door open for Evian, which came to the United States in 1984. Evian's U.S. marketing was built around images of toned young men and women in tight clothes sweating at the gym. Madonna drank Evian--often onstage at concerts. "If you were cool, you were drinking bottled water," says Ed Slade, who became Evian's vice president of marketing in 1990. "It was a status symbol."

Evian was also a still water, which Americans prefer; and it was the first to offer a plastic bottle nationwide. The clear bottle allowed us to see the water--how clean and refreshing it looked on the shelf. Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tinny aftertaste before you take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.

Perrier and Evian launched the bottled-water business just as it would prove irresistible. Convenience and virtue aligned. Two-career families, overprogrammed children, prepared foods in place of home-cooked meals, the constant urging to eat more healthfully and drink less alcohol--all reinforce the value of bottled water. But those trends also reinforce the mythology.

We buy bottled water because we think it's healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn't healthier, or safer, than tap water. Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world's $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four--the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico--that has universally reliable tap water. Tap water in this country, with rare exceptions, is impressively safe. It is monitored constantly, and the test results made public. Mineral water has a long association with medicinal benefits--and it can provide minerals that people need--but there are no scientific studies establishing that routinely consuming mineral water improves your health. The FDA, in fact, forbids mineral waters in the United States from making any health claims.

If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water, springwater, and luxury waters. At the height of Perrier's popularity, Bruce Nevins was asked on a live network radio show one morning to pick Perrier from a lineup of seven carbonated waters served in paper cups. It took him five tries.

We are actually in the midst of a second love affair with bottled water. In the United States, many of the earliest, still-familiar brands of springwater--Poland Spring, Saratoga Springs, Deer Park, Arrowhead--were originally associated w

Message in a Bottle ~ 2nd installment

from an article at FastCompany

And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

At the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills, where the rooms start at $500 a night and the guest next door might well be an Oscar winner, the minibar in all 196 rooms contains six bottles of Fiji Water. Before Fiji Water displaced Evian, Diet Coke was the number-one-selling minibar item. Now, says Christian Boyens, the Peninsula's elegant director of food and beverage, "the 1 liter of Fiji Water is number one. Diet Coke is number two. And the 500-milliliter bottle of Fiji is number three."

Being the water in the Peninsula minibar is so desirable--not just for the money to be made, but for the exposure with the Peninsula's clientele--that Boyens gets a sales call a week from a company trying to dislodge Fiji.

Boyens, who has an MBA from Cornell, used to be indifferent to water. Not anymore. His restaurants and bars carry 20 different waters. "Sometimes a guest will ask for Poland Spring, and you can't get Poland Spring in California," he says. So what does he do? "We'll call the Peninsula in New York and have them FedEx out a case.

"I thought water was water. But our customers know what they want."

The marketing of bottled water is subtle compared with the marketing of, say, soft drinks or beer. The point of Fiji Water in the minibar at the Peninsula, or at the center of the table in a white-tablecloth restaurant, is that guests will try it, love it, and buy it at a store the next time they see it.

Which isn't difficult, because the water aisle in a suburban supermarket typically stocks a dozen brands of water--not including those enhanced with flavors or vitamins or, yes, oxygen. In 1976, the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water a year, according to Beverage Marketing Corp. Last year, we each drank 28.3 gallons of bottled water--18 half-liter bottles a month. We drink more bottled water than milk, or coffee, or beer. Only carbonated soft drinks are more popular than bottled water, at 52.9 gallons annually.

No one has experienced this transformation more profoundly than Kim Jeffery. Jeffery began his career in the water business in the Midwest in 1978, selling Perrier ("People didn't know whether to put it in their lawn mower or drink it," he says). Now he's the CEO of Nestlé Waters North America, in charge of U.S. sales of Perrier, San Pellegrino, Poland Spring, and a portfolio of other regional natural springwaters. Combined, his brands will sell some $4.5 billion worth of water this year (generating roughly $500 million in pretax profit). Jeffery insists that unlike the soda business, which is stoked by imaginative TV and marketing campaigns, the mainstream water business is, quite simply, "a force of nature."

"The entire bottled-water business today is half the size of the carbonated beverage industry," says Jeffery, "but our marketing budget is 15% of what they spend. When you put a bottle of water in that cold box, it's the most thirst-quenching beverage there is. There's nothing in it that's not good for you. People just know that intuitively.

"A lot of people tell me, you guys have done some great marketing to get customers to pay for water," Jeffery says. "But we aren't that smart. We had to have a hell of a lot of help from the consumer."

Still, we needed help learning to drink bottled water. For that, we can thank the French.

Gustave Leven was the chairman of Source Perrier when he approached an American named Bruce Nevins in 1976. Nevins was working for the athletic-wear company Pony. Leven was a major Pony investor. "He wanted me to consider the water business in the U.S.," Nevins says. "I was a bit reluctant." Back then, the American water industry was small and fusty, built on home and office delivery of big bottles and grocery sales of gallon jugs.

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

Nevins looked out across 1970s America, though, and had an epiphany: Perrier wasn't just water. It was a beverage. The opportunity was in persuading people to drink Perrier when they would otherwise have had a cocktail or a Coke. Americans were already drinking 30 gallons of soft drinks each a year, and the three-martini lunch was increasingly viewed as a problem. Nevins saw a niche.

The right to Drink Water

from an article at The Alien Next Door:

The Right to Drink Water

Here’s the scenario: Fifty-year old Jane recently adopted a healthy diet and regular exercise routine. She briskly walks around the local park daily. Three times a week she jogs to the local gym, where she does yoga and a small work out. She ends up in their little cafeteria where she buys a healthy muffin and a bottled water, confident she is doing the right thing in avoiding the pops and high-sugar juices.

Great for Jane. There’s only one thing wrong with her selection: in choosing to buy bottled water, she is implying a choice against tap water. In doing that, she is supporting the implication that water is a commodity to buy and sell, rather than a national heritage and the right of all citizens of this planet—with associated individual, national and global responsibility to keep clean and sustain for our future generations and planet’s well being.

“Water is a public trust,” says Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water Issues to the President of the United Nations. “This means that no one owns water in a jurisdiction but rather that it belongs to a nation’s citizens, the ecosystem and the future.”

To buy bottled water is literally to buy into a paradigm that accepts that water is not free but can be bought and sold. It makes water a commodity. Water is in actuality a natural right for all living things on this planet, humans, plants and wildlife. Water is necessary to all life. Without water all life dies. All life has the right to clean drinking water, and to use it wisely. No one should own it or abuse it.

Here are additional reasons why bottled water should be avoided:

• The bottles litter our environment: The billions of plastic containers that hold water are littering our landfills for hundreds of years. Contrary to popular belief, only 35% of plastic water bottles are recycled. The rest end up in our landfills.

• They overuse and deplete key watersheds: Coke, Pepsi, Neslé and others “mine” aquifers of community watersheds for profit and often without regard for local needs. Nestlé, for example, is currently taking 3.6 million litres of groundwater per day in Aberfoyle, Ontario, depleting the nearby community at Mill Creek (Council of Canadians).

• They contribute to climate change: The production and transportation of bottled water produce greenhouse gas emissions that exacerbate climate change.

• It’s not as good for you: Also contrary to popular belief, water kept in plastic bottles may be less clean, may accumulate plastic residue and is less regulated than public water.

There is a grassroots movement to “unbottle” water in Canada and other parts of the world. City councils, school boards, teachers and private business owners are taking bottled water out of their buildings. “Unbottling it” is about far more than making a choice against bottled water; “It’s about reclaiming public water, keeping it clean, recognizing it as a public trust, not a commodity,” says Stuart Trew in the Spring 2009 issue ofCanadian Perspectives, the magazine of The Council of Canadians.

I was happy to hear that my son’s high school recently adopted “unbottling water”. The alternative is unacceptable. Sticking a water vending machine next to the water fountain tells our children—who are our future—that we don’t trust our public water (despite the fact that public water is cleaner and better regulated than bottled water—Council of Canadians). “It says we’re not willing to invest in our public water systems, which can only lead people to think it is normal to pay for water, not to expect their society to manage it and keep it clean for current and future generations” (Stuart Trew, Canadian Perspectives) and the future of our planet.

I use a container and fill it with tap water. That simple.

Photos:

1. Toulouse examines what's available in the hospital vending machine

2. pristine creek in Nova Scotia

3. Toulouse poses with a Nestle "eco-friendly" water bottle